Tuesday, October 23, 2007

UK's largest carbon footprints revealed

Winchester has finished top of a league table of cities which take the biggest toll on the environment.

...WWF said the results revealed a damning picture for the UK as even the lowest-ranked cities were consuming more than their fair share of natural resources

The report claimed: "We are on the cusp of the sixth wave of mass extinction that the Earth has experienced. Tracking of this degradation shows around a 30 per cent decline in populations of terrestrial, marine and freshwater vertebrate species between 1970 and 2003. This year The World Conservation Union (IUCN) warned that "life on Earth is disappearing fast and will continue to do so unless urgent action is taken"....MORE

As I struggle to get a handle on this stuff, there are two questions I can't find the answers to:

1) How many species of life are there?2) Has anyone compiled a list of the species that became extinct last year?UPDATE: "in the past 500 years, human activity has forced 820 species to extinction." source